


Make Hell Grant What Love Did Seek

by thefairfleming



Series: City of Illusions [5]
Category: A Song of Ice and Fire - George R. R. Martin
Genre: Alternate Universe - Historical, F/M, Gladiator AU
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-05-28
Updated: 2016-05-28
Packaged: 2018-07-10 17:15:26
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 608
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6997459
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/thefairfleming/pseuds/thefairfleming
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Sometimes he still thinks of her as she was that first night she came here, dripping in silks and jewels, hair twisted in an intricate sculpture atop her head. At the time, he’d hated her for her silks and jewels, hated what he’d seen as a clear symbol of the power she’d held over him. Jon had seen rich, beautiful women come to Mars Street before, seeking gladiators to warm their beds, and rage had always filled him at the sight. Wasn’t it enough, he’d thought time after time, that they were slaves, animals to be used for nothing but the bloodiest of entertainment? Were they meant to be whores as well?</p>
<p>Jon has sneered at those men who’d gone to noble ladies beds, thinking them weak. </p>
<p>But now, as he watches Sansa dress, he thinks he understands them better.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Make Hell Grant What Love Did Seek

Jon likes watching her dress. 

She wears simpler things when she visits him now, simple stolas of dull colored material, a palla to match that covers her hair. There’s hardly any jewelry on her, and in an odd way, he misses that. He enjoyed the gleam of cold, the hard glint of gem against her skin as he made love to her. 

Sometimes he still thinks of her as she was that first night she came here, dripping in silks and jewels, hair twisted in an intricate sculpture atop her head. At the time, he’d hated her for her silks and jewels, hated what he’d seen as a clear symbol of the power she’d held over him. Jon had seen rich, beautiful women come to Mars Street before, seeking gladiators to warm their beds, and rage had always filled him at the sight. Wasn’t it enough, he’d thought time after time, that they were slaves, animals to be used for nothing but the bloodiest of entertainment? Were they meant to be whores as well?

Jon has sneered at those men who’d gone to noble ladies beds, thinking them weak. 

But now, as he watches Sansa dress, he thinks he understands them better. Perhaps it was weakness, or perhaps they hadn’t had a choice in the matter, but maybe there were men who simply wanted the comfort of a lovely woman in their beds. Who delighted in feeling soft skin under their roughened palms, who wanted to sleep in sheets that smelled of expensive perfumes. 

Those don’t seem like such a bad things to want now.

“You never wear your finer things,” Jon says, tucking an arm behind his head, and Sansa throws a small smile over her shoulder.

“What was it you called me that first afternoon? A ‘painted peacock?’ Something of that nature?”

Jon winces, and wants to pull her back to the bed to apologize in the best way he knows how, but Sansa is already rising from the mattress, twisting her hair into a simple braid. 

“I thought….,” he begins, unsure of how to tell her the violent mix of emotions he’d felt that day, the anger that this woman had come to make him something he had no desire to become coupled with a surge of desire as his eyes had moved over her ivory skin, her slightly parted lips. He had hated and wanted in equal measure that day, and it had led him to say things he never should have said. 

The memory shames him now, even as Sansa smiles down at him. “You thought I was a spoiled rich girl come to take my pleasure with a champion of the arena.” 

That smile turns wicked, and she drops one knee to his bed, leaning forward on her hands and crawling towards him. “And I thought you were a graceless brute,” Sansa continues.   
He would kiss her, but she stays just out of reach, her lips brushing over his brow. “And we were both right,” she whispers, making him huff out a laugh even as he closes his eyes, letting his hands come to rest on her hips.

And then her lips press against his forehead in a kiss of surprising sweetness. But no. Not surprising, now that he thinks on it. She always kisses him on his brow before she leaves.

“But fortunately for us,” she murmurs against his skin, balancing on her knees so that she can wrap her arms around his shoulders. “We love each other anyway.”

He does love her. To distraction. Probably to his doom. But he holds her and lets her kiss his brow again nonetheless.


End file.
